Brian Staveley - The Last Mortal Bond

There had been a hope of escaping the Aedolians back in the Bone Mountains where the terrain favored the monks. Kaden enjoyed no such advantage on the streets of Annur. Worse, il Tornja’s soldiers weren’t trailing along somewhere behind, they were everywhere, lunging out of doorways and alleys, appearing at intersections, calling out to one another in ear-shivering blasts on their horns. Were it not for Valyn, the Annurians would have killed both Kaden and Triste a dozen times over, but Valyn, somehow, was everywhere.

When Annurians came on horseback, he killed the horses. When they came with spears, he rolled beneath the shafts and cut the arms from the attackers. Once, when Kaden rounded a corner to find two legionaries leveling flatbows at his chest, Valyn lunged in front. An ax flew end over end into the face of one of the bowmen. Kaden couldn’t see what happened next. Or he saw it, but his mind couldn’t work through the fact. There was an arrow. A flying arrow. Then there was not. It looked as though Valyn had snatched it from the air, but that was impossible. There was no time to dwell on it. Valyn had reached the other bowman, caved in his throat, retrieved the first thrown ax, and was waving them on again.

His look brought Kaden up short. Despite the blood bathing his arms, soaking the tattered cloth of his clothes, Valyn didn’t look like a man fighting for his life. He looked … glad.

No, Kaden thought. Not glad. Something else .

There was no time to ponder words. Even as he paused, the Annurians were closing.

“Come on, Kaden,” Triste said, dragging him forward by the wrist. “Come on .”

Kaden met her eyes, saw the fear and determination there, and he ran.

The red walls of the Dawn Palace nearly proved their undoing. They’d come at the fortress from the west and south, working their way through the streets until they burst from one final crowded lane into the open space before the walls and the short bridge leading to the Water Gate.

The Water Gate was nothing compared to the towering Godsgate that opened west onto Annur’s main thoroughfare. It was an entrance for minor ministers, deliveries of food and wine, workers come to repair roofs or walls. It was a small gate, but it was blocked by a steel portcullis, and for all Valyn’s ability to hack his way through human flesh, his axes would do nothing to get them past that grille.

“West,” Valyn said, checking his momentum before he reached the short bridge over the moat. “We’ll go in the Great Gate.”

Even as the words left his lips, however, a knot of twenty or thirty soldiers, half bearing loaded flatbows, marched out from a side street at the double to block the way west.

“East,” Kaden gasped. “The harbor.”

But there were men to the east, too, spreading out in a tight cordon across the street.

Valyn hefted his axes, as though testing their weight. “We’ll go through them.”

“That’s insane,” Triste hissed.

“She’s right,” Kaden said. “I don’t care how good you are, we’re not going to survive, not through that.”

“So we don’t survive,” Valyn said. “So we die.”

His voice sent a shiver up Kaden’s spine.

“The canal,” Kaden said, gesturing to the filthy water swirling along the base of the wall.

One twitchy bowman loosed his bolt. It landed twenty paces distant, steel head striking sparks as it skittered across the stone.

“We didn’t make it,” Triste whispered. “We didn’t make it.”

Then, before Kaden could reply, madness erupted in the western rank of soldiers. Men cried out in pain and surprise, turned, tried to bring swords and bows to bear on some new, unseen foe, calling out conflicting orders even as their companions fell. The line of men, so strict and disciplined just moments earlier, flexed, then caved inward, like a river’s high bank before the rising waters of a flood, calving off at first, then collapsing. Kaden could just make out, at the center of the violence, two figures, little more than shadows, really, in all the kicked-up dust, fighting back to back, hacking their way through the stunned ranks of Annurians.

“It’s another army…,” Kaden began, then trailed off as a gust of wind shoveled away the dust.

There was no army. There were no rows of newly arrived soldiers to rank against those other deadly rows. There were just the two shadows, neither of them as fast as Valyn, but fast enough, twin blades naked in their hands as they forced their way forward step by bloody step, leaving a screaming, twisted human wreckage in their wake. Then, a moment later, they were free, bursting from the front rank of the legion, charging full tilt at the bridge. Both wore Kettral blacks, but their similarity ended there. The man was short, pockmarked, coal black, shaved-headed. The woman was tall, beautiful but freakishly pale, her yellow hair streaming out behind her.

“Well, Holy Hull,” Valyn said, taken aback for the first time since their desperate flight began.

“Not Hull,” the man said as they reached them. “Just a couple beat-up soldiers.” If Valyn was some preternatural hunter stalking the streets of Annur, these two looked half dead. Both were drenched in blood; a vicious blaze had singed the hair from half the woman’s head. The man’s blades were notched in half a dozen places. Somehow, though, they’d come across the city, cutting their own way through the Army of the North, and when the man spoke again, his voice was hard, level, focused. “What now?”

Valyn pointed. “We need in, past the gate.”

Neither of the Kettral asked why. The blond woman just threw up a hand, a casual gesture, as though she were flicking water free of her fingers. Behind Kaden there was a groan like the earth itself were breaking apart, then a deafening crash. He turned to find the steel portcullis crushed, crumbled, shoved aside.

“Go,” Valyn said, seizing him by the shoulder, hauling him onto the bridge even as the bolts and arrows started falling once more. “Go.”

“Triste,” Kaden said, but the short man had her by the arm, was dragging her with him as he ran.

They were Kettral-that much was clear enough-although beyond that Kaden had no theories. It didn’t matter. There was only one thing left that mattered.

“The Spear,” he gasped, pointing up at the impossible glass tower looming above. “We have to get to the Spear.”

* * *

Adare watched from the wall as the Kettral attacked.

Balendin stood atop a small, charred knoll, the site, until days earlier, of some temple, the ruined walls and buttresses of which still stood, protecting him from anyone approaching from behind. He’d been plying his stomach-churning violence there for half the day, unseaming men and women as though they were dolls, opening the skin, holding up the dark, pulsing organs to the light, bathing in the cries of the surrounding Urghul and, presumably, the horror of the soldiers atop the wall.

He had just torn the tongue from another helpless prisoner when the five birds came at him, one from every point of the compass and one stabbing down from above. It seemed an impossible attack to stop. Each of those birds was the size of a large canalboat, all wing, and beak, and claw. Through the long lens, Adare could see the Kettral on the talons beneath, armed to the ears with blades and bows. They started loosing arrows early, and kept shooting as the birds closed.

“They’re going to do it,” Adare breathed quietly. “They’re going to kill that fucking bastard.”

Nira was silent at her side a moment, studying the battle through her own long lens. Then she shook her head.

“No,” she replied grimly, lowering the lens. “They’re not.”